Lessons for Japan from Chernobyl
By April Yee
6 May 2012 In her purse, Ikuko Hebiishi carries a Geiger counter, one of two she owns. Wrapped in a protective plastic bag, it makes her feel safe by telling her exactly where radioactivity is dangerously high. Mrs Hebiishi is a city councillor for Koriyama, a town in the Fukushima prefecture 34 kilometres from the site of the triple meltdown that struck the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant last year. Today, Koriyama, which lies 4km outside the mandatory evacuation zone, has 250 radiation monitoring posts, where Geiger counters like Mrs Hebiishi’s measure for hotspots in real time. On this particular day, she is not looking for radiation left behind by a one-year-old disaster, but one from 25 years earlier. She has flown more than 8,000km to tour Chernobyl and the villages where its radioactive plume had hovered after the 1986 explosion and meltdown. She had a question. What becomes of a community a quarter century after a nuclear disaster? Two nations, separated by tradition and culture, had been thrown together by disasters that changed the way the world thought about atomic energy. Japan was a donor to Ukraine for the construction of a sarcophagus to cover the damaged Chernobyl reactor building. In the past year, the aid has flowed in the other direction, with Japanese nuclear officials visiting Chernobyl headquarters for guidance and with an agreement signed last month to cooperate on post-disaster response. “Countries that have experienced such terrible disasters at nuclear power plants are quite naturally attempting to coordinate efforts not only in tackling their consequences, but also in preventing them in the future,” Andriy Kliuyev, the secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council, told Ukrainian media. “We, in turn, are ready to use the experience we have accumulated over the last 25 years to help … Japan tackle the consequences of the accident at the Fukushima plant.” […]
